1. Call it Tom Friedman’s Worst Nightmare: Asia’s already outpacing the United States in clean technology investment by hundreds of billions of dollars — which will mean the U.S. will be importing trillions of dollars in green tech down the road, says a new report. (Hat tip: CleanTechnica.)
2. Call it a Whale’s Worst Nightmare: Japan’s whaling fleet is off to the Southern Ocean for its annual hunt. Dot Earth quotes ocean explorer Sylvia Earle on why eating whale isn’t at all like eating a farm-raised cow, which is what Japanese whaling interests claim.
3. Call it Todd Stern’s Worst Nightmare: Pledges by individual countries to limit their greenhouse gas emissions are multiplying like tribbles, reports The New York Times — and UN climate czar Yvo deBoer is now putting pressure on the Obama administration to release its own proposal.
4. Call it a Gearhead’s Worst Nightmare: Star driver Jeff Gordon has joined with the EPA to warn the public that auto painting causes air pollution and degrades human health, reports Ecopolitology.
5. Call it Ungreen Companies’ Worst Nightmare: GoodGuide releases an iPhone app that scans product barcodes and gives you ratings on the product’s healthy, environmental, and social impacts. (62,000 products in the database so far, says CNET’s Health Tech.)

What will a successful global climate change agreement look like? That question is only more important to ask in the wake of this weekend’s agreement by President Obama to a plan that will ask world leaders to reach a political agreement at this December’s UN climate talks in Copenhagen, ahead of a more binding agreement some time in 2010.

From a purely scientific perspective, the solution to climate change is straightforward. Burning fossil fuels and clearing forests over the last century have sharply increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, leading to climate change. So, burn less fossil fuel and protect more forests in order to cap and eventually reduce greenhouse gas concentrations to a safer level.

The politics of that solution are much more complicated. Developed countries like the United States need to cut emissions dramatically, since their high emissions are responsible for getting us to this point. Developing countries like India and China need to take some responsibility for the future as their emissions rise and their forests continue to be cleared. For the former, that means breaking bad carbon-intensive habits. For the latter, it means establishing good low-carbon habits from the start.

A successful climate treaty will hinge on agreeing to how much developed and developing countries will reduce their respective greenhouse gas emissions, and also on agreeing how rich countries will help poor countries finance it all. At the same time, those emissions reduction commitments need to add up to enough global reductions to actually keep temperature change under 2 degrees C, the level beyond which impacts are likely to be irreversible and potentially catastrophic.

One reason countries are struggling to agree on emissions reductions going forward is that they have each had very different emission histories and so think they should have different responsibilities for containing future emissions. According to an interactive feature in the Washington Post, the United States has always been and remains a giant emitter of greenhouse gases. China’s surging coal-fired economy is now the single biggest emitter of all.

But China also has a population more than three times that of the United States, meaning that its per capita emissions are still a fraction of those from gluttonous Americans. Meanwhile, some European countries like Germany have already begun a steady but shallow decline in their total and per capita emissions. Missing from these statistics, though, are emissions from deforestation that catapult Indonesia and Brazil into the third and fourth ranks globally.

At the same time that negotiators work to agree on differential emissions commitments and the associated financing, they also need to make sure the emissions reductions add up to successfully stop climate change. According to Climate Interactive’s scoreboard, global greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by more than 80% by the end of the century to keep temperature change under 2 degrees C. Current pledges would reduce annual global greenhouse gas emissions by about 33%. Additional reductions being suggested could save another 33%. But more will be needed to turn the world onto a safer climate trajectory.

So what could a successful climate change agreement look like? What mix of emissions reductions would be fair for developed and developing countries, and will it be enough to stop climate change? Reductions of 25%-40% by 2020 are frequently suggested, but likely insufficient. Negotiators headed to Copenhagen have a hard job to do. But it is still possible for them to succeed.

You can explore some of these challenges and possibilities for a successful global climate change agreement using Climate Interactive’s C-Learn simulator. It lets you set emissions reduction targets for developed countries like the United States, fast-growing developing countries like China and India, and small developing countries like many in Africa. You can also set goals for reducing emissions from deforestation and sequestering emissions through reforestation. The simulator will then tell you how those targets add up in terms of overall emissions and predicted temperature change.

It may look and feel a bit complicated, but that’s how the real-world challenge is. Give it a try and see what ideas you come up with for how a successful global agreement could keep climate change under 2 degrees C. And then share your ideas here and at Planet Change.

(Image: Traffic at a stoplight in Bangkok. Credit: seasidebear/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

Bogdkhan Uul, just south of Ulanbator, Mongolia, is the oldest national park in the world. That’s right — it predates Yellowstone by over 100 years. Established by the Mongolian government in 1778, it was originally chartered by Ming Dynasty officials in the 1500s as an area to be kept off limits to extractive uses, protected for its beauty and sacred nature.

In 1778, it had 23 full time park rangers on staff. Today, there are only five. And therein lies a tale of a traditional conservation ethic degraded by modern politics and pressures.

We set out from Ulanbator at 7am by taxi to the monastery site of Manzushir, about an hour south, with the idea of walking across Bogdkhan back to UB. Established in 1733, Manzushir had over 20 temples and was home to 350 monks. The Soviets reduced it to rubble and killed or exiled all of the monks in the 1930s as Mongolian Buddhism was nearly stamped out because of its resistance and threat to Stalinism. The monastery is about 100 acres in size, located in a south facing valley below some jagged rock cliffs, and nestled within the boundaries of Bogdkhan.

In the cold early morning, the day before Halloween, walking around the ruins, half-walls, hundreds of terraces and foundations, and a lone restored building, we could almost hear the whirring of prayer wheels, see the young novitiates carrying water from the stream for the day. We could hear the echoes of the lives spent here in devotion and ended in a spasm of political and religious atrocity. Mongolian Buddhism, whose closest relative is Tibetan Buddhism, is slowly rebuilding monasteries and communities — but, as with many ancient traditions in Mongolia, the loss of 3 generations to Soviet interference has left these traditions ill-equipped to cope with the modern world.

An interesting parallel is what happened to the herding culture of Mongolia under the same pressures. In the 1930s and 40s, the traditional pastoralists of this country — herding groups and clans that had sustainably grazed the grasslands for at least 1,000 years using complex social, cultural, geographic and meteorological systems and cues — were forced into shared ownership communes and collectives. Some groups managed to integrate their historical knowledge into the collective, some ignored the collective and kept their traditions, and many others lost their practices to the Soviet socialist experiment. In 1990, the date of Mongolia’s independence, the claim of one of the world’s last nomadic people to the land that had sustained them for generations was in serious doubt. And the last 20 years has done nothing to secure their rights, as the government of Mongolia has issued mining leases on their lands without consultation, partially privatized some lands, and failed to put in place trespass protections.

Bogdkhan is about 100,000 acres, mostly forested mountainous country, surrounded by grasslands to all sides except to the north where the city bounds it. Tsetseegun Mountain is at the center of it, one of the 4 sacred mountains around Ulanbator. There is really only one trail into the center of the park, access is limited, yet the past 20 years have seen a number of illegal encroachments and uses inside the boundaries of the strictly protected area. These have happened when some official of the city of UB or a Mongolian ministry official issues an official-looking piece of paper to a businessman to build a Ger Camp (tourist tent) or to a Middle Eastern sheik to build a huge luxury home.

It also happens when local residents get hungry and look to the park to hunt food or graze animals. Twenty years ago, big herds of Red Deer, close relatives of elk, would walk through the middle of UB on their way between seasonal grazing areas; wolves were occasionally heard on the outskirts of town. The pressures of population, corrupting influence of money and the severance of a multi-generational institution of conservation have slowly frayed the quality of this, the world’s first national park.

East Asian Buddhism has the concept of Pure Land, a realm existing in the primordial universe outside of space-time, produced by a buddha’s merit. It is tempting to think of several hundred years of monks and nuns contemplating the celestial in the bosom of earthly Bogdkhan. And equally tempting to hope that some day, this place will achieve again the ideal of conservation that was started there hundreds of years ago. Until then, perhaps the ghosts of nuns and monks will mingle with the ghosts of the red deer in the Pure Land realm.

(Image 1: Bogdkhan Uul Strictly Protected Area, Mongolia. Credit: yeowatzup/Flickr through a Creative Commons license. Image 2: Ruins of Manzushir Monastery. Credit: Yaan/Wikimedia Commons through a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license.)

As UN negotiators from around the world gather in Barcelona this week to continue hammering out a global climate deal, the question of emissions reduction targets has grabbed center stage in the press.

But even if all countries stopped emitting greenhouse gas pollution today, the impacts of climate change will be felt for years to come.

We must reduce emissions to minimize any future impacts. But negotiators must also develop policies and financial mechanisms that will help communities – and the natural resources they rely upon for survival – adapt to and overcome the climate impacts we are already seeing today.

The Nature Conservancy hosted an event here in Barcelona (webcast) last night highlighting adaptation actions we and others are launching around the world. The actions presented are the types that UN negotiators should include in a global agreement to ensure it provides the support needed to protect people and nature from the ravages of climate change.

Mike Beck, senior scientist with the Conservancy’s Global Marine Team, spoke of how sea levels are rising faster than anyone had previously projected, and how coastal communities are struggling to survive.

Mike unveiled an innovate new web tool called Coastal Resilience that shows in detail how sea level rise is hitting Long Island, NY. Users can look up how different sea-level rise scenarios will impact specific areas according to development type (commercial or residential areas); demographics (such as age or economic status); habitat types; and other specific social, economic and environmental classifications.

Residents can even look up their home addresses in Long Island and see how sea-level rise will impact their property.

The tool also allows government agencies to see where hospitals, fire stations and other emergency response organizations are located in connection to the areas that will be worst hit by sea-level rise.

“Most emergency responses to storms and flooding are made at the local level. But most localities don’t have access to this kind of information,” Mike said during the presentation.

Engaging communities in dealing with climate change impacts is crucial in places like Long Island, and even more so in developing countries where vulnerable communities are likely to face some of the greatest impacts. Several countries are now building upon the Coastal Resilience work to develop similar tools for their regions. The Conservancy is working with partners in the Caribbean to develop a similar tool.

“[In the Caribbean] most hotels and the tourist industry are based around these coastlines,” Mike said. “They’re socially and economically critical.”

Also joining the event was Rence Sore, the Solomon Islands‘ permanent secretary of environment, conservation and meteorology, who spoke of how his country is combating rising sea levels. Sore described how many of the islands in his nation are just one meter above sea level and are already dealing with coastal erosion and salt water contamination of crop lands.

“We depend on natural resources,” Sore said. “Climate change is impacting our food and water security.”

He said his government is incorporating the impacts of climate change in their development plans and are focusing on protecting their natural resources, from mangroves and coral reefs and more, to ensure they can continue to provide food and water to local communities.

The Conservancy is working in the Choiseul province of the Solomon Islands, in partnership with the Lauru Land Conference of Tribal Communities, to help plan local coastal land and resource management in response to climate impacts

These examples show how, in developed and developing countries alike, providing information and engaging communities are essential components to dealing with the impacts of climate change.

In Barcelona, our team is advocating that a global climate agreement draw on and strengthen the capacity of indigenous peoples and local communities to monitor, understand, and respond to climate change through effective adaptation measures. Protecting and restoring natural resources are some of the most effective measures for strengthening the resilience of both people and nature.

To learn more and spread the word about a global climate agreement, visit Planet Change.

(Image: Researchers in the Solomon Islands. Credit: David Wachenfeld © 2004 Triggerfish Images.)

It’s Election Day in the United States — get out and vote! Then immediately get back on your smartphone and check out the hottest in online green this morning — including what might possibly be the best green name ever…

1. Mt. Kilimanjaro’s ice cap is disappearing — but is that climate change’s fault? Two research teams are disagreeing, reports The New York Times, with one blaming a decline in moisture rather than rising temperatures. (No word on which side of this debate the band Toto — which had the 1982 smash hit song “Africa,” which in an eerie coincidence mentions both Kilimanjaro and “the rains of Africa” — comes down. We’ll keep you posted.)
2. Meanwhile, Nepal’s cabinet plans to meet on Mount Everest to show the world how global warming is melting Himalayan glaciers, reports Associated Press. (No need for oxygen tanks — they’re only going to base camp, not all the way up.)
3. The leader of Orthodox Christianity — Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who calls himself “the green patriarch” — is in Washington this week, talking up the spiritual importance of environmentalism, reports the Washington Post.
4. Speaking of the Post, check out their great infographic tool that tracks total national per capita CO2 emissions since 1950. (Hat tip: Treehugger.)
5. Which societies will survive climate change best? Gaia Vince (which has to be one of the great green names in history) surveys the field at Yale Environment 360 and likes…Laos, among other places.

(Image: Mount Kilimanjaro. Credit: Picture_Taker_2/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

1. Can long-range climate forecasting get good enough to help us adapt climate change? That’s the vision of Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA. But other scientists say it’s pie in the sky, reports Climate Feedback. (Not that anyone’s predicting actual pie floating in the sky…)
2. Are exaggerated claims about the risks of global warming undercutting efforts to stop it? Indubitably, say some British scientists in a Times of London piece. (Hat tip: Dot Earth, who asks: Can world leaders and climate campaigners tout a low-emission energy future instead of shaking the climate change boogie man?)
3. Certified sustainable palm oil is a booming business, reports Environmental Leader — rising from only about 15,000 tons sold worldwide in May to more than 100,000 in the last two months. (Somewhere in Indonesia, an orangutan — maybe a bunch — say thank you.)
4. Mon Dieu! Why are vandals putting a big dent in Paris’ bike-sharing program? They see the bikes as bourgeois, reports The New York Times — maybe because you have to present a credit card to own one? (Hat tip: Triple Pundit.)
5. Why worry about energy sprawl when feeding Rover chews up so much more real estate? A new study in New Scientist says that it takes over two square acres of land to feed a medium-sized dog — and, with Americans owning about 75 million dogs and 88 million cats, that takes a land mass bigger than Texas, says Wired Science!

Yes, global warming is a big deal and a big challenge. But sometimes I get so frustrated by conservation and environmental NGO’s for not being able to chew gum and walk at the same time — in other words, for failing to appreciate the real lesson of greenhouse gas emissions.

The real lesson is there is no such thing as succeeding at local conservation (and no such thing as protecting your backyard or local community’s natural heritage) without paying attention to global pollution as a whole – of which greenhouse gases are but a few of many.

The National Academy of Sciences has just released a study of global sources of local pollution that is revealing and compelling in its analysis of the long-range transport of pollutants into and out of the United States.

Do you know what’s landing in your backyard? Try ozone, particulate matter, mercury and persistent organic pollutants that have all traveled halfway around the globe from Asia and North Africa, according to the study.

We also give what we receive — the pollution we produce travels to Europe and Canada. There is haze in the Arctic because of particulate matter “imported” from thousands of miles away, and the western United States has experienced several episodes of dust being dumped on it from Asia.

These pollutants are not a vanity or aesthetic issue — they take a huge toll in human health, affecting especially children and other vulnerable portions of our population:

• Ozone is linked to the rate of child admissions to hospitals for asthma.
• The health impacts of particulate matter may account for millions of deaths worldwide per year.
• Organic pollutants impair hormonal, nervous, immune and reproductive systems.
• And perhaps most insidious of all is mercury — which interferes with the developing nervous systems of human fetuses and young infants.

Meanwhile, mercury and organic pollutants can also wreak havoc on wildlife, with well-documented impacts on fish and birds.

What does conservation have to do with this? Simply put, air pollution is the quintessential issue that links ecosystem health and human health and global land use and conservation. For instance:

• Dust storms can result from poorly managed arid lands.
• Organic pollutants are products of unsustainable agriculture.
• The Nature Conservancy’s own analysis of mercury found it to be a major threat to our conservation goals in northeastern United States.

Conservation has historically and consistently neglected pollution. Look at most conservation science textbooks and you will find long sections on invasive species, on deforestation, on greenhouse gas emissions…but almost nothing on pollution. Of course greenhouse gases are now categorized by the EPA as a pollutant — but that was only recently, and most of the public would not think of greenhouse gas as pollution in the same way mercury is.

The Nature Conservancy did publish last year a report on air pollution and wildlife in the eastern United States. But I do not understand the lack of uproar about pollution on the part of the Conservancy and other conservation NGOs. Pollution is the threat to biodiversity and people that can tie us all together in a common cause. If we purchased 90 percent of all the private land in the United States and set it aside for conservation but did not address these global sources of pollution, it would all be for naught.

I am all for focus — with Copenhagen coming up, it is natural that we talk and talk about emissions reductions. But climate change is simply one symptom of a general failure to think clearly about the costs and benefits of our actions in terms of general human well-being and ecosystem health. And climate change is but one of many threats to conservation that can only be dealt with by international agreements.

Let’s hope that negotiations at Copenhagen and beyond that are aimed at reducing greenhouse gases pave the way for future international cooperation regarding a wide variety of global pollutants.

(Image: Air pollution and power lines in China. Credit: AdamCohn/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

“The forest is our supermarket,” says Bang Liling, the deputy chief of Long Oking village inside the Berau district of Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of Borneo.

It tells you something that that’s a common phrase heard in this part of the world, which I visited earlier this fall.

“We get all of our medicine from the forest,” adds Lung Bu, village leader of Long Oking, a nearby village. “The roofs of our buildings, our huts on the field, they all came form the forest. So our lives depend on the forest.”

Think how often you go to the supermarket, not just for food but for other supplies like medicines and toiletries. Then imagine what happens when the supermarket is gone.

The protection of forests in Indonesia is clearly important to local people who depend on the forest for their resources and livelihoods. But it turns out that these forests are also important to everyone on the planet. Forests play a crucial role in fighting climate change, and Indonesia’s forests are disappearing faster than any others’ on Earth.

Forests are remarkably efficient at taking greenhouses gases out of the atmosphere. When forests are cleared, we not only lose the potential for them to pull more gases out of the atmosphere, but all the gases that were being held inside them are released and added to the global emissions tally. Deforestation alone accounts for 17 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

That’s why The Nature Conservancy is working with local villagers and logging companies in Indonesia to reduce the impacts of conventional logging practices. Simple changes can yield more intact forests, cleaner water, healthier and happier local villagers, and more trees sequestering carbon and fighting climate change.

When I was in Berau recently with the Conservancy’s reduced-impact logging (RIL) manager, Bambang Wayhudi, it struck me that this approach to logging creates a win-win-win situation — one that keeps much-needed jobs for loggers, protects forest resources for local communities and reduces the emissions caused by conventional logging.

RIL is just one of multiple carbon emission reduction strategies that are part of an approach called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). This initiative was just announced by the Government of Indonesia for the district of Berau at the UN climate change talks in Bangkok.   

Says Agus Purnomo, head of delegation of Indonesia and head of the Secretariat of the National Council on Climate Change:

“Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation is possible, and doable. By linking our district level initiative in Berau, which is just one of the sub-national processes in our national climate change program, to the international discussions we are showing how to deliver REDD implementation.”

At the global climate change negotiations coming up in Copenhagen this December, many groups—including the Conservancy—will join with several governments to send a clear message: the protection of forests is a vital part of combating climate change.

It is Bambang’s hope and the Conservancy’s hope that the local communities continue to manage their own forests with their local knowledge for their supermarket…and ultimately for all of us.

(Image: Bambang Wayhudi. Source: Bridget Besaw.)

1. Driving on glass sounds kind of sketchy, but an Idaho-based engineer has invented solar panels that you can indeed drive on. The next step is lots and lots of testing.
2. U.S. climate legislation is coming down to nuclear power and offshore drilling — Republicans say they might support a bill if they can get more of the above, and Dems say they’re willing to negotiate.
3. Here’s another cool new technology for fighting climate change: devices called “artificial trees” that can pull CO2 from the atmosphere. But many questions need to be answered before it can be implemented widely, says David Biello in Yale Environment 360.
4. Warning, this one’s a little creepy: A Taiwan company is using the waste heat from their crematorium furnaces to help generate electricity to power building air conditioners.
5. A new study from The Naure Conservancy (hey, that’s us!) and partners compares interest in outdoor activities with donations to conservation groups. Turns out that hiking and backpacking are correlated with higher giving rates than visits to public lands…which could spell trouble for conservation’s piggy bank if the decline in activities like hiking continues. Read more about the study.

Mark Tercek is president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy.

Over the last few months, I have been participating in a bipartisan commission — The Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests — that is focused on the connections between climate policy here in the United States and protecting tropical forests. The commission comprises some of the country’s leading government, business, conservation, science and national security experts, and is co-chaired by former Senator Lincoln Chafee and John Podesta, the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress and former White House chief of staff.

Today, the commission unveiled our report highlighting a cornerstone of the policy debate: We cannot win the battle against climate change without protecting our forests.

Destruction of the world’s forests each year produces 17 percent of all carbon emissions released into the atmosphere. Each year, roughly 50,000 square miles of forest — an area larger than the state of Pennsylvania — disappear.

Today’s report calls on Congress to pass legislation that will help cut emissions from tropical deforestation in half within a decade and achieve zero net emissions from the forest sector by 2030.

While this sounds like an ambitious goal — and it is — forest protection requires no technological breakthroughs and is one of the most cost-effective strategies we have to address climate change.

Currently, cash-poor but forest-rich nations can earn more money by destroying their forests than by conserving them. But the United States can lead in the global climate battle by providing the incentives and support developing countries need to protect their forest resources and lower emissions.

The report is particularly timely now, because the Senate is considering a climate change bill that offers a significant opportunity to implement a number of these recommendations. And by offering to partner with developing countries to reduce emissions from forest destruction, the United States could help other countries undertake more ambitious efforts to reduce emissions as the countries of the world head into climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December.

The commission calls for the United States to mobilize $14 billion each year by 2020 to protect the world’s forests, largely from private funds. This mobilization could be accomplished by enacting comprehensive climate policy legislation that caps and steadily reduces U.S. carbon emissions and provides incentives for U.S. companies to invest in forest conservation. In this way, such a program would create a win-win opportunity for businesses, consumers, forests and the people who inhabit them.

In the global effort to contain climate change, it is important to take steps to reduce all major sources of carbon emissions. Yet a ton of carbon emissions reduced through forest protection is just as important for our atmosphere as a ton of carbon reduced from a tailpipe or a smokestack.

The commission also recommends that the United States commit to early and sustained public investments — starting with $1 billion by 2012, and increasing to $5 billion annually by 2020 — to unlock these cost savings and begin to reduce deforestation in nations that cannot initially attract sufficient private capital. A well-designed cap-and-trade program, supplemented by bold commitments through the appropriations process, would provide an effective mechanism for providing this sustained public financing. (See a recent speech I gave at Yale University to learn more.)

At the Conservancy, we have seen first-hand how forests can be a powerful tool against climate change. For more than 10 years, the Conservancy has worked with some of the country’s leading businesses to launch programs that protect threatened forests, lower emissions, benefit local communities and fight climate change.

Our Noel Kempff project in Bolivia is the world’s first — and only — forest carbon project to have its emissions reductions verified by a third party. By bringing together AEP, PacifiCorp, BP, the Bolivian government and local communities, the project is protecting 1.5 million acres of tropical forest and will prevent the release of 5.8 million tons of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

In Indonesia, The Nature Conservancy is currently working with government agencies, private businesses, local communities and other partners to launch a massive forest carbon program that will span the entire governmental district of Berau – equal to the size of the country of Belize.

And in the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Para, which account for 70 percent of Brazil’s deforestation, we are moving forward with two large-scale reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) pilot projects that have the potential to halt millions of acres of deforestation and reduce emissions of millions of tons of carbon dioxide. These programs will demonstrate to U.S. and international climate change policymakers how REDD can work in practice.

Along with reducing emissions, stopping deforestation protects biodiversity as well as the food, water and economic resources communities rely upon for survival.

Halting the destruction of the world’s forests is within our grasp. The United States can and should lead in this effort, and the report released today shows the path forward.

(Image: Arcoiris waterfall at Noel Kempff Mercado National Park in Bolivia, South America. Credit: Hermes Justiniano.)